Someone in the Door

153: PASSOVER New Jewish Memoirist Explores Brokenness and Nourishment

Listen to this voice!

Here’s the real-life setting: She wrote the following lines just 48 hours ago. Her Passover Seders are done for another year — and Lynne Schreiber’s marriage is nearly done, as well.

Filled with the spiritual and emotional turmoil of that moment, she turns to her keyboard and sends all of us the following words: “I’m 36. I’ve lived with an illusion for eight years. Now the illusion, the dream, is dissipating, and I have no idea what I’ll see in its place. I grip the armrests of my desk chair, my knuckles whiten. “I am tempted to close my eyes tightly in fear.”

Then — she writes these next words: “But I won’t. I have to keep my gaze straight.”

This is the voice of a brave and eloquent new spiritual memoirist, Lynne Schreiber. She’s already a successful writer, mainly for national magazines, and she’s also the author of several books, including poetry and nonfiction. (You can click on the cover of her book “Hide and Seek” below and find out more about that book.) Now, in addition to her work for print magazines, she has launched an online magazine she calls “Nourish Cafe,” where Lynne is exploring the creative possibilities of spiritual memoir. Live. Online. Real. And, from our perspective, she’s got her eyes, her heart and her mind fixed squarely on the true pathway into this genre: She is pursuing Truth, wherever Truth leads her, and she’s inviting us along for the journey.

Planting potatoes

This isn’t just David Crumm, Editor of ReadTheSpirit, making these claims.

This is the truth from the mouth of the prophet of contemporary spiritual memoir. I’m talking about the writer, who — before Anne Lamott and Rob Bell and Brian McLaren and all the rest had so much as jotted down their first drafts — was out there pioneering this genre and attracting the positive attention of the New York Times Review of Books. I’m referring to the great Frederick Buechner, who put it this way in his memoir “Telling Secrets”: “I have come to believe that by and large the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very telling and very important to tell. They are telling in the sense that they tell what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition — that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else.” When I asked Buechner about this famous comment, in an interview with him some months ago, he even went further in talking about this point. He added this: “It’s more powerful than that, in a way: Every life tells the same story, I believe. … Not only do we all have our stories of ups and downs, nightmares and high hopes in our lives. It’s more than that. We all really have the same story only with minor variations. That’s the point of being a memoirist: You’re not only telling your own story; you’re telling everybody’s story and giving them another handle to hold onto their lives.”

That’s why I love Lynne’s decision to hang a welcoming sign above her new online memoirs, labeling her sacred corner of the online realm: “Nourish Cafe.” Her underlying assumption in this unfolding memoir is that, despite life’s strange and sometimes painful turns — there is nourishment waiting for us. I’m fascinated by her voice — a smart, strong, observant Jewish woman fearlessly trying to figure out her own pathway — and confidently asking us to come along for the journey.

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